Do we need multiple, independent exit polls?

[elperromagico]

Exit polls are regarded by many - myself included - as a guard against fraud. But as we've seen, one exit poll doesn't seem to stand up as any sort of proof; there are ready-made excuses for flaws in one poll, and we've all heard them in the past two months.

But what if two exit polls don't gel with the tabulated results? What if three don't? How about four?

So what if you have four exit polls, performed by independent polling groups? Does it make a difference, or would that many exit polls be just as easy to dismiss as "faulty"?

[ashmanonar]

1. bush: "we don't need no stinking exit polls"

nor an honest election, it would seem.

how useful are exit polls if people don't use them as a form of election control, and if they try to keep this one down, what prevents them from "debunking" the others?

[BlueInRed]

2. I think it's a must for Democrats

to do their own exit polls or have an unbiased, unattached organization doing them.

No way should we have to rely on people like the guy who did them and then skewed them to match the final count.

I think we have to assume they are going to cheat and have to devise a helluva lot better ways of proving it, including full access to exit polling.

[proudbluestater]

3. I am very uncomfortable with just one polling firm sending results

to the corporate media and them telling us. We should have the corporate whores out of the process somehow.

I would like to see at least two polling firms. One chosen by Republicans, the other chosen by Democrats.

The way it stands now, with only one polling firm, whose computer inexplicably crapped out for two hours during election night (that's a load of bullshit in itself), it doesn't make one feel confident in the process. Especially when you witness CNN and the polling firm playing a little match up the vote to the poll game.

But, hey, if you're Ed Gillespie of the RNC, you can just ask that we throw those dang exit polls out since they're not accurate. Funny, there were totally accurate until Bush started running for president.

[4democracy]

4. We can't trust the media for anything else, why should we trust them

to control exit polling? We definitely need independent polling accountable to the American public.

[progressiveright]

5. we need paper trail

Wasn't there a bill that some republican senator tried to pass about that? Hutch or something.

Electronic voting is fine, as long as there is a receipt. You go into booth, you vote, you get a receit, and you push button to confirm that's the person you voted for. You give paper to the clerk who puts it in a locked box that is under constant surveilance by cameras, police, election watchers from parties and organizations. If there is something fishy or machine fails you open the box and count papers and compare it to what the machines got. It's such a simple and common sense concept that the fact that Florida and other legislators and administrators were fighting it so hard makes me believe that there probably was fraud, and I never cared for conspiracy theories.

[qwghlmian]

6. It's simple - come up with 30-40 million dollars

(because that is how much it would take to conduct an exit poll in a national election that would be designed to detect fraud), hire one of the polling companies, dictate to them (since you're paying) the methodology and watch them while they do it so they do it right.

Come up with 60-80 million, and you can do two of these. 90-120 and you can do three. etc.

The reason Mitofsky's exit polls can be dismissed as insufficient proof of fraud is simple - these exit polls were not designed to detect fraud. Their sampling is not sufficiently large or wide to do it and the methodology (such as adjusting the raw numbers to the actual results) is not suitable. But they are cheaper than the fraud-detecting exit polls.